End of the line: suburbia celebrated at London Transport Museum

Postcard of Harlesden Gardens, 1910. From the Suburbia exhibition at the London Transport Museum

The paradise at the outer edge of the urban railway line, the land of the garden gnome and the privet hedge, where there is certainly honey still for tea and a labelled place in the shed for every rake and trowel, is celebrated in an exhibition at the London Transport Museum.

Suburbia, which visitors enter through an arch in a giant hedge, brings together posters and photographs, estate agents' brochures and train tickets advertising suburban hairdressers, postcards celebrating the spotlessly neat, almost car-free streets, and even toys including building sets which allowed a child to construct a model semi-detached des res all of their own.

The exhibition shows how as underground and overground lines spread over what had been green fields in the late 19th and early 20th century, commuters were bombarded with propaganda to abandon the smoke and grime of the city centres and colonise the suburbs ‑ where maps showed almost as many golf courses as stations, and as one 1920s building society poster in the exhibition insisted: "Sunshine is brightest where it falls on your own house."

The railway lines, all losing money, fell over themselves to lure people into daily 40-mile round trips. Upper Norwood was promoted as "the fresh air suburb ‑ 380 feet above the Thames, therefore out of the valley fogs". A house builder promised: "The imposing elevation of Robinson's new £750 type of residence ... a tempting scene of comfort and cosiness and all laid out with due regard to the needs of the housewife."

Names of ancient villages were borrowed, or convincingly olde worlde names invented. One photograph shows a scene which could come from a Constable painting, about to vanish under concrete for a new Piccadilly line station and suburb, with a large sign inviting people to write in their suggestions for a new placename: "Oak Wood? Merry Hills?" the sign suggested. The site became the lyrical Southgate.

From the beginning "suburban" also acquired a sneering ring which it has never lost: land of the immaculate herbaceous border, but also of the living dead.

"I think from the start intellectuals like the Bloomsbury group sneered loudly at the suburbs as a place alien to culture, and it never really lost that," curator David Bownes said. Bownes himself is careful to make plain that he comes from rural Cheshire, and is not sure that his present home in east Finchley should really be classified as suburban.

Museum director Sam Mullins is emphatic that although he once lived in Harpenden, he now lives in the inner city. Though the fact that he has a both a garden shed and a greenhouse, and that his street last year won the Islington in Bloom competition, is highly suspicious.

By bus to the pictures tonight, by Tom Eckersley and Eric Lombers. Suburbia exhibition at London Transport Museum

Readers can add their own visions of paradise ‑ or the inferno ‑ to the exhibition by joining a flickr group and uploading their own images of suburbia. Many are already incorporated in a wall of vintage postcards in the museum, and others are being added throughout the exhibition. The mother of whoever contributed the image of that really outrageously untidy living room may want a little word ...